Buxtehude, Dieterich - Passacaglia in D Minor for Bassoon & Piano BuxWV 161 Bassoon, Piano |
Composer : | Buxtehude, Dieterich (1637 - 1707) | ||||
Instrumentation : | Bassoon, Piano | ||||
Style : | Baroque | ||||
Key : | D minor | ||||
Arranger : Publisher : | MAGATAGAN, MICHAEL (1960 - ) | ||||
Copyright : | Public Domain | ||||
Added by magataganm, 07 Aug 2018 Dietrich Buxtehude is probably most familiar to modern classical music audiences as the man who inspired the young Johann Sebastian Bach to make a lengthy pilgrimage to Lubeck, Buxtehude's place of employment and residence for most of his life, just to hear Buxtehude play the organ. But Buxtehude was a major figure among German Baroque composers in his own right. Though we do not have copies of much of the work that most impressed his contemporaries, Buxtehude nonetheless left behind a body of vocal and instrumental music which is distinguished by its contrapuntal skill, devotional atmosphere, and raw intensity. He helped develop the form of the church cantata, later perfected by Bach, and he was just as famous a virtuoso on the organ. The Passacaglia for organ in D minor, BuxWV 161, may well be Dietrich Buxtehude's most famous piece of music -- but that does not mean, sadly, that it is by any stretch of the imagination well recognized. It is one of three ostinato-oriented, ground bass organ pieces (BuxWV 159-161; a related work is BuxWV 137, whose brief final section is a chaconne) in which Buxtehude refocused the lens of his quintessentially north-German organ art to look at the Spanish-Italian chaconne and passacaglia forms -- forms hitherto foreign to mainstream German organ music. Like nearly all of Buxtehude's music, BuxWV 161 has to this point remained undatable -- the best we can do is say that it was probably composed during his 40-year tenure as organist at the Marienkirche at Lübeck, a post he held from 1668 to his death in 1707. In the Passacaglia, Buxtehude assigns the repeating four-measure ground bass to the pedals, and allows the two hands to devise ever more elaborate filigree -- here contrapuntally ordered, there made into more obviously virtuoso stuff -- to go above it. Buxtehude builds a four-section plan from the modulations through which he puts the ground bass (D minor - F major - A minor - D minor); each section is exactly 30 measures in length, with a one-measure "fill" separating neighboring sections. It is easy to recognize, when encountering such an unwaveringly precise but flexible-sounding architecture, the extent to which such works as the Passacaglia influenced Buxtehude's spiritual descendent J.S. Bach, who is of course famed for his intricate and sometimes mathematical structural layouts, and who as a young man traveled some 200 miles on foot so that he might hear Buxtehude play. Source: AllMusic (https://www.allmusic.com/composition/passacaglia-for-o rgan-in-d-minor-buxwv-161-mc0002361998 ). I created this Interpretation of the Passacaglia in D Minor (BuxWV 161) for Bassoon & Piano. Sheet central : | Passacaglia (5 sheet music) | |
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